A rediscovered classic from 1935, the Cuban-Italian author's debut collection of 18 stories brings to life the final years of a bygone world.
Convinced that he shares a destiny with the doomed protagonist of a serialized novel, a man begs its author to change the ending.
A 15-year-old boy experiences the sweet melancholy of an unrequited first love, as his older cousin prepares for her wedding in the country.
A small detail shatters the illusions of a once-happy husband, making him doubt his vivacious young wife.
Written in clear, beautiful prose with acute psychological insight, Alba De Céspedes's remarkable first book is filled with characters who feel at once timeless and deeply rooted in a way of life that would soon be destroyed by World War II.
Autorentext
Alba de Céspedes (1911-1997) was a bestselling Italian-Cuban feminist writer greatly influenced by the cultural developments that led to and resulted from World War II. In 1935, she was jailed for her anti-fascist activities in Italy. Two of her novels were also banned-Nessuno Torna Indietro (1938) and La Fuga (1940). In 1943, she was again imprisoned for her assistance with Radio Partigiana in Bari, where she was a Resistance radio personality known as Clorinda. After the war, she moved to Paris, where she lived until her death in 1997. Her novels include Forbidden Notebook, Her Side of the Story, and There's No Turning Back.
Jenny McPhee is the author of The Center of Things, No Ordinary Matter, and A Man of No Moon. Her translations include books by Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Giacomo Leopardi, Curzio Malaparte, Paolo Maurensig, Elsa Morante, Anna Maria Ortese, and Pope John Paul II. Her translations have been short-listed for or won the American Literary Translators Association Italian Prose in Translation Award, the Society of Authors John Florio Prize, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. She has received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.
Ann Goldstein is a former editor at The New Yorker. She has translated works by, among others, Elena Ferrante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Donatella Di Pietrantonio, and Alessandro Baricco, and is the editor of the Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and awards from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.